Meta

After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised “no-fly” list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.

The ACLU is suing to find out more, but apparently the TSA refuses to say why these people ended up on the list, and there’s no procedure for getting a name off of it. This means that the government can, for reasons they won’t reveal, put someone on the list and guarantee that they’ll be subject to extra security procedures every time they fly in the U.S. As Nathan Newman says, “Okay, this is fascism. Not the late stages but the early stages, where if it’s not stopped, it grows into a cancer.”